Facebook has just issued a huge update to its native search functionality, making it even better. The new update finally brings Facebook’s semantics based “Graph Search” to its iPhone app. This means that you can easily search for the posts that have been shared with you in the past by your friends, by simply using the text included in those posts as search keywords.
You can even use phrases (e.g. my friends who went to college with me) as search strings, and the Graph Search will figure out the rest easily. The best part about this is that the search results only include the posts that have been actually shared with you, thus ensuring that unnecessary posts shared on your timeline don’t clog the search results. The updated search functionality will shortly start rolling out to users who’ve set their default language as English (US), and will be initially available on Facebook’s desktop version, as well as its iPhone app.
Facebook Search Update: The Power Of Graph Search, Now Also On Your iPhone
As explained via an official blog post a few hours ago, the updated search functionality brings the power of Facebook’s Graph Search (beta) to the iPhone variant of its mobile apps. For those who don’t know, Graph Search is Facebook’s own semantic search engine, that lets you search for content using queries constructed in natural language, instead of generic keywords. This means that if you want to search for all your Facebook friends who went to school with you, you can formulate a search string like “my friends who went to school with me”, and Graph Search would return the list of friends who have listed the same school in their Facebook profiles as yours. Although Graph Search is still in beta, it works surprisingly well.
Graph Search has existed on the desktop (web) version of Facebook for quite some time now, but this mobile centric update brings it over to Facebook’s iPhone app as well. In addition, the update also improves the graph search on Facebook’s web variant. The update will start rolling out in the coming days to Facebook on desktop and iPhone, and will be available in the US English.
Concluding Words
Facebook’s Graph Search has been great ever since it was introduced about two years ago, despite the beta tag. And the latest update makes it even better, ensuring that all of the important posts shared with you are just a few clicks away. So try it out, and let me know how you find it in the comments below.
